Heather Yakin: Mele's lawyers face tough fight to get his trial moved

Michael Mele's lawyers are looking for a change of venue in the murder case against him. They're looking at a fight that's uphill, both ways, in a driving snowstorm.

Heather Yakin

Michael Mele's lawyers are looking for a change of venue in the murder case against him. They're looking at a fight that's uphill, both ways, in a driving snowstorm.

The last time an Orange County criminal case was moved elsewhere was the trial of the man who caused the death of Ellen Gilman, daughter of then-U.S. Rep. Ben Gilman and his wife, Jane Gilman, in 1977. Gilman was — and still is — a beloved public figure.

Mele's case is definitely high-profile. He's charged with murder, manslaughter and evidence tampering in the death of Brooklynite Laura Garza, who was last seen late on Dec. 3, 2008, in his company.

The case was irresistible to the media at large: The disappearance of a beautiful young woman who moved to the big city with dreams of becoming a professional dancer, only to cross paths with a registered sex offender. So irresistible, in fact, that when Mele was in court in 2009 for moving without telling the sex-offender registry and for having a couple of stolen credit cards, his lawyers tried to get those cases moved out of Orange. They were not successful.

They're trying again in the murder case.

Orange County District Attorney Frank Phillips, who doesn't want the case moved, said you can't know if you can get a fair jury until you start picking one. Phillips prosecuted the Gilman case. Back then, he says, defense lawyers got the trial moved based on court papers with clippings attached from the Times Herald-Record and Newburgh Evening News. Back then, that was the local media storm. These days, it takes a lot more.

Phillips said the defense has to show that the public has been so tainted by pretrial publicity that there's no way you'd find 12 reasonable people who could fairly consider the evidence.

In 1993, when serial killer Nathaniel White went to trial in the murders of five women and a teenage girl, Orange County Judge Jeffrey Berry came up with a way to weed out bias among jury candidates who'd read or watched some of the heavy-duty news coverage. He called them each into his chambers, with the lawyers and White present, and questioned them to see if they could be fair. "A lot of jurors were excused, but we were still able to seat a panel," Phillips said.

David Hoovler, a local defense lawyer, was a prosecutor with the Bronx District Attorney's Office back in 2000 for the trial of the four NYPD cops who fatally shot Amadou Diallo. The trial was moved to Albany, in part because of an 11th-hour ACLU newspaper ad that featured the Miranda warnings as text, punctuated with 41 bullet holes for each of the shots fired at Diallo.

"General media coverage just does not do it," Hoovler said. "You need heightened, skewed coverage as you lead up to the (trial) event."

All that gets you is a chance, not a guarantee.

Hoovler said he thinks Mele's case has a fair shot at a change of venue.

"It's a classic case that cries out for it," he said. "You'd have to be living under a rock."